the girl who would be goddess
by Serendipity1
Summary: She's always felt a strong sense of duty. It's just difficult, sometimes, to tell who she has a duty to, and precisely what that is. Yue-fic.


**Title**: the girl who would be goddess  
**Author**: Serendipity  
**Words**: 1,299  
**Fandom**: Avatar: The Last Airbender  
**Characters**: Yue  
**Summary**: She's always felt a strong sense of duty. It's just difficult, sometimes, to tell who she has a duty to, and precisely what that is.

_"It's me and the moon," she says  
I got no trouble with that  
But i am a butterfly, you wouldn't let me die  
"It's me and the moon," she says_

'Me and the Moon', Something Corporate

*

Yue feels like she's not quite chained to the ground, sometimes.

It's a peculiar feeling. There really are no words for it.

She can be standing on an icy pathway, watching arctic water flow past her in the canals, and the wispy edges of a strange, bittersweet _something _clutches at her heart. Makes her feel like she's not really standing there at all, but rather like she's floating, or swimming. Swimming through air, in leisurely, slow strokes that ripple and fold. And it touches everything- the swimming, the ripples, the chains of sad-sweet _something _that slip through her body and wind themselves around her chest. But that's not really the proper way to describe it, either.

Not at all.

*

She has moon dreams. They drift over her sleeping eyes, tickling with eyelash-light touch, sending her visions of vast white surfaces and endless empty movement.

Of course she knows the significance- after all, she has white hair like new ice because her heart was touched in the pool of the spirit oasis. Sometimes she looks at others and thinks of dark hair, like wet stones, like dirt beneath the permafrost, like the starless night sky. Yue thinks of it brushing against her neck and tickling her forehead and tumbling long and luxurious down her back.

But that's neither here nor there. She has white-silver hair and Tui breathed life into a human baby so many years ago, and that child was her.

Still, she thinks that she will have to lose a lot more than her dark hair because of it. That's not a prophecy or a flash of foresight. It's an instinct, as gut deep as fear of falling- she knows, somehow, that there is a price that has yet to be called in. She knows that like every child knows of the face stealer and his false promises, his long and black pincers for fingers, and that if you step on a crack in the ice, it means pain doubled to your mother's next childbirth, and that staring into the eyes of a turtleseal long enough will show the future. Someday, Yue will face the price of a life bought by a spirit's kindness.

Yue has moon dreams, and they feel like an unfinished promise. Like a message from a far off friend, left half-written and waiting for a response.

Those dreams_ pervade_. That's probably the word for it. She's not necessarily good at words- Yue's more the type who knows the value in a silent answer. Still, this one word, _pervasion_, seems suitable enough for the way she feels about the dreams that slip through her nights, silent and brief, like a window viewing some vast and alien world. They're empty, and soundless, and massive. Yue feels like crying in the dreams for the isolation of them- the feeling of weightlessness compounded with the sensation of endless heaviness.

The dreams are like water, drenching her clothes, weighing her down with burdensome moods. Seeping through her skin.

Not every night. They don't come every night. And even when they come, they are but a flicker, like the swift blink of an eye.

*

She's not a waterbender, but water answers to her call. That's not really how she wants to put it, come to think of it. Waterbenders beckon imperiously, and water surges up to answer- a connection close as the mind's with the body.

It's different with Yue. There's nothing she could ask of the water that it wouldn't give of its own free will. When her boats make their way through the wide canals of the city, the water lets them pass, sending wood and leather along on the currents without the slightest motion of resistance. Those who paddle the watercraft she travels on often comment on the easy trips- the swiftness of the current, the smooth, flowing streams.

When she dips her hands in water, it glides past her, like a caress. Like a whispered assurance from an old, treasured friend. It never confuses her. Yue is a daughter of the Water Tribe, so of course she would be precious to water.

She will never drown. Water simply bears her up unquestioningly.

*

Hahn isn't pleasant. He just isn't. She meets him first when he kills the first whale of the season, after having proven all the right manhood tests in order to be worthy of the hand of the princess. Not of Yue, she thinks, not worthy of Yue, but the princess. It seems as though she and the princess are entirely separate entities sometimes, because she doesn't judge worthiness based on the ability to kill a whale. It seems, she admits uncomfortably to Yagoda one evening, to have absolutely nothing to do with marriage.

Yagoda, of course, points out that a husband must provide protection and food.

Yue points out that a husband must also provide attention and love. Hahn is severely lacking in these areas, she states. Surely that means that, as a husband, he will be lacking in the warmest sense of marriage. Yue can ill afford ideas of falling in love with a boy at first sight and slowly courting them, as those below her station have the precious freedom to do, but she would very much like a boy who doesn't grind against her very being like stone against stone.

In the end, it really doesn't matter. This is the man chosen for her and she will wed the strongest warrior, because that is what is best for her people, who struggle in the world that is slowly being eaten up by flame. She is the princess of the Northern Tribe, and their ways have kept them from the fate of the Southern sisters. Yue knows well the tug of duty to her people- it echoes in her footsteps and the very beat of her heart.

On their first meeting, he formally announces their engagement. There is no request required, because their marriage has been arranged between Hahn and her father. All the formalities, questions, and etiquette settled, he presents her with a necklace made of icestone and ties it around her neck with a smug, proprietary smile and no gentleness in the hands that tug the leather string against the soft flesh of her neck. All of this feels wrong, as if she is dancing the steps of a festival piece to the tune of a soft, sweet pipa-player, and the steps she dances are for another place entirely, or are unlearned and stilted. Yue fingers the blue-dyed cord and smiles convincingly, but not at him. She looks at a fringe on his shoulder so as not to see the look in his eyes when he gazes at her.

Yue sees that look in a man's eyes when he looks upon a prize turtleseal bull he has brought back from the hunt. She doesn't want to think of a life with a man who will see her as something to be pursued, slaughtered, bled out and laid out upon his table like a rich delicacy.

"This is your duty," her father tells her, and she thinks yes, it is. And then no, it isn't.

There's something else.

*

Those koi fish in the spirit oasis tug at her so hard she feels as though she could fall into the water with them. It's a peaceful place, here. Warm, like it never is in the spring or summer, a glimpse of the lower countries beneath the pole. She comes often, to think. To dream.

When the moon is at its fullest in the sky, round and shining and swollen, it's like the moonlight has a weight of its own, settling on her shoulders like a well-worn cape.

Every time she visits, she feels like she's coming home.


End file.
